Radical Sobriety Montreal is organized by and for radical addicts/alcoholics in recovery. It’s a grassroots response to the reality of widespread addiction in our communities and our lives. It’s an affinity group, based on carrying out the direct action of recovery. It’s a collective, aiming to facilitate individual growth, accountability for our actions, and support for trauma. It’s a safe* place to talk about dangerous things.

Membership is open to anyone who is anywhere within the process of recovery, and who is committed to maintaining an anti-oppressive environment at meetings. We maintain a very low tolerance for hurtful bullshit, while prioritizing accessibility. In other words, we emphasize sincerity of action over vocabulary, as we recognize the complex barriers to accessibility facing many addicts/alcoholics.

Operating according to the premise that solidarity means taking care of each other, we meet weekly to offer support, safety, company, and guidance wherever possible. Believing that the personal is political, we try to engage with our addictions within the framework of radical political analysis. We reject models characterizing our addictions as being purely personal, spiritual, or moral failings, and instead understand addiction as a multi-layered phenomenon, with complex causes and consequences, stretching from the level of social structure all the way down to the biomolecular level.
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* within the context of constantly talking about really heavy shit with a bunch of fiends and drunks

greenanarchy website has an article called intoxication culture that links alcohol with the rise of civilization and includes the following paragraphIntoxication Culture is defined as a “set of institutions, behaviors, and mindsets around consumption of drugs and alcohol” by the author of Towards a Less Fucked Up World: Sobriety and Anarchist Struggle.7 To be clear, Intoxication Culture is not the same as intoxication itself. As mentioned earlier, many prehistoric (or is it pre-hysteric?) foraging people have, and their modern descendants continue to carry, knowledge of intoxicating plants and substances. The difference between an individual experience and our habitude is just that: what for the primal person is an individualized, conditional moment is for the civilized a compulsion. I have chosen to use the term Addiction Culture to expand and extend this concept to include other psychoactive substances, the pharmaceuticals that are pushed by mental and other conventional health industries, the aforementioned dependence upon technological mediation, and in fact the whole of domesticated existence.

a piece on afro-pessimism that seems to adhere more closely to wilderson’s ideas that wilderson himself did in talking to folks (in the interview that was our last encounter with him in the study group).